Quote

What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Stories
Interests
Fiction
Within
Narrowly
Story
Constraints
Interest
Plot
Whether
Moves
Moving
Tells
Someone
Defined

More quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.
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I'm totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it's OK because I'm doing it for a reason, for a good reason.
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David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - The Sports Gene - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an all-star challenge on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decat
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There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.
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What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.
Malcolm Gladwell
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Does that mean we should give up? Probably. But there are two issues worth considering. The first is - is it really true that drugs destroy the integrity of the game?
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Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.
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I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
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If you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.
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Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
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A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.
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That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
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Outlier are those who have been given opportunities-- -and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
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I think actually the marketing community is approaching a crisis: There are just too many messages competing for too little attention. That is the fundamental problem.
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Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.
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We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability-relentl ess effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.
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What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.
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A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.
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When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.
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The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
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